This is the English reading version of the Dutch news item BIMCraft kan Revit-bestanden lezen, maar niet alles komt mee.
This video by Blender 3D Architect shows how to open a Revit file in BIMCraft, an open-source and free BIM programme that rebuilds the way Revit works, with no account and no subscription. According to the video the strongest reason to stay on Revit is gone with it: your old projects are no longer locked inside Autodesk’s file format.
What is new: you open a .rvt or .rfa file from a Revit version between 2015 and 2027, through File > Open or on the command line. The file is read while a message says so, and you get a new project that you have not saved yet, with an import report showing per category what came in and what was skipped, with the reason. Writing back to the Revit file never happens: you save in its own format or as IFC. The reader for those files was written by the project itself, because the format has no public description; no part of Autodesk is used for it.
According to the video its first test found 254 elements, of which 17 were left out; in a second project that was 13. The same drawing came in fuller as IFC than as a Revit file. BIMCraft is honest about that itself: the project calls itself in fast, early development and writes that everything the reader cannot decode is left out and listed instead of guessed. In that list are, among others, curtain walls, sloped floors, stairs and families.
My verdict: BIM is not my field, so I will not say much about it. What I can say: I made a small building in it myself, and that went easily, something I could not manage in FreeCAD for BIM. What strikes me is that a project nine days old already manages to read the file formats of the big CAD companies. That promises a lot: hopefully we will soon be able to read SolidWorks files too. I have already seen the first pull request for that at SolidCraft.
What is open and self-hosted in BIM programmes, I track on BIM & Architecture. Keep an eye on this site for updates and tests. I will keep following this and publish my findings here.